


Impression

by missbeizy



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: F/M, RPF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-14
Updated: 2014-12-14
Packaged: 2018-03-01 09:20:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2767895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missbeizy/pseuds/missbeizy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He notices her seven months after meeting her.  To himself he jokes that he only truly met her that day on the beach, with the wind tangling her hair and her feet sunk halfway into wet sand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Impression

He notices her seven months after meeting her. To himself he jokes that he only truly met her that day on the beach, with the wind tangling her hair and her feet sunk halfway into wet sand. He has a conversation with her in his head, switching silent octave to mimic her response. _Hello, Christine. Hello, Viggo._ He's thinking that if she stopped moving she'd catch just the right shadow to render her perfect under the scrutiny of a lens. A lens that would capture her, would reach deep and pull forward the hidden dark flecks in her clear eyes.

*

His photographs are wholly diverse, but were anyone to catalogue his work from start to finish they would have no great difficulty in spotting certain themes: transition, distortion, nature, pieces rather than wholes. He's a fan of the partial--a great lover of motion and light and everyday things caught in the dim space between extraordinary moments. There is a great nobility in watching common elements expand and contract. If he allowed himself to see this in full--watched every living thing--he would never even manage to get past breakfast, so he picks and chooses. She makes the cut.

*

_Talk to me_ , he thinks, but doesn't mean that literally, because he sees her very little and speaks to her even less. But the setting always seems to facilitate his observance--outdoors in gorgeous weather or indoors usually for a dinner get together--and she doesn't have to talk for him to listen. He falls in love with what different sorts of lighting do to her. He falls in love every hour on the hour with this or that, naturally. But for the sake of the translucent replica of her inside his head, he dwells on his thoughts of her.

*

He drives a van full of inebriated hobbits and elves home and she ends up in the passenger seat. She cheerfully replies to her husband's drunken exclamations of love, a giggle caught on her bottom lip. Her undiluted happiness and the way it manifests along the lines around her mouth are significant distractions. Viggo tips his metaphorical hat to the near-emptiness of the road. "I can drive for a bit, if you're tired," she says, acknowledging without direct reference that he had been filming rigorous battle sequences all afternoon. The sharp cut of her profile accepts his "No, I'm fine."

*

Viggo shares an hour with Alexandra. She hands him a sheet of paper and a tin of crayons and informs him that they can't get their costumes out of place or dirty and that they're supposed to sit very still and draw. He rationalizes that it wouldn't be polite to express his dislike of authority at such a proper table, and sketches a quick drawing full of shades of green. Alex tilts her head and chews her lip at it when they compare their results, and Viggo is delighted to the point of laughter when she pronounces it "pretty good."

*

Christine is almost never around during the day. She assists mostly everywhere, but not on location unless Alex is needed. So it's no surprise that he can't concentrate the first morning he finds her inspecting the mirror (or lack of mirror) in his trailer. His makeup artist is five strides behind him. He stops in the doorway and startles her, despite his effort. "It's gorgeous," she says, pointing to the mirror that's covered in photographs. "Thank you," he replies, and she's leaving. He never questions her about her presence there, but his ears ring for the remainder of the day.

*

Where would she go, if he were placing her? Nature? Woman, mother--a very nature-based category. Transition? Settled as she may seem, the project has thrust them into a kind of transition. Distortion? Known for what she does and gives but not for what runs through her mind when she thinks about eating ices at the hottest part of the day when she was seven years old. She is a chasm of possibility because she doesn't truly exist for him. The weight of this is frustrating. So he picks pieces, finally, because that's the one thing that will make sense.

*

He returns a jacket that Sean loaned him months ago, hoping that the randomness of the action doesn't make her uncomfortable. The skeleton of her voice inside his head assures him it won't, and the placement of his green drawing on the refrigerator door in her kitchen confirms this, though he can't figure the connection exactly. She's wearing a production t-shirt and flat sneakers and her blush is smudged, giving the impression of imprinted fingers. He resists putting his hand up to the mark and instead asks, "If you have a free afternoon, would you like to sit for me?"

*

The image of her on the beach has never left him. The way her feet carried her over the sand, her pants rolled up around her knees, her hair free and uncombed, the bend of her body against the strong ocean breeze--it tumbles, multiplying until he cannot disassociate that day from the construct of her in his mind. He walks every inch of his house and property and when that fails, walks the surrounding blocks. He sets up every camera he owns, switching lenses and fiddling with lighting until he can't keep his eyes open. He dreads this session.

*

"I didn't know what to wear," she admits, and when he grins and replies, "Did you think I was going to ask you to come nude?" she smirks and shoots back, "Need I remind us both who I'm talking to?" and he looks away from her eyes though his smile remains. He takes her on the route he traveled yesterday in preparation, arranging her in this and that room. He plasters her then against grand vistas (in New Zealand that means walking ten steps from your front door), and savors the contrast. Back inside he sets up lamps and candles.

*

She laughs too much and her teeth are slightly crooked. It's mind-numbingly perfect. After ten minutes with the candle she complains lightly with a smile about being hot. Sweat dots her forehead and upper lip and he begs her to hold on for just a few minutes more, unwilling to give up the change that the heat inspires unless she's truly uncomfortable. When he gets what he hopes will be what he was going for, she blows out the candle. Viggo takes her home. In her driveway he off-handedly asks if she'd be up to doing it again next week.

*

Out of dozens of pictures, there are only two that he likes. A black and white shot of her bare feet from a high and tilted angle, with a shadow curling around the bottoms of her toes, and a shot of her that was botched--her head turning away from the camera just as he pressed the shutter, catching the fuzzy whirl of the motion in skewed shades of sepia. Two out of seventy-something is amazingly good for him; and they are acceptable (never perfect). He makes copies and slips them in her mailbox on the way home one evening.

*

Between bouts of possession by Aragorn, Viggo thinks about Christine's placing. Pieces has to be the way with her and, perhaps, the way of all women like her; though again for the sake of maintaining his bias he doesn't think of that last. She's beautiful because of her parts and ravishing because of slight imperfections. He lingers over this when it comes to mind, which isn't as often as one would predict, savoring the smack of its aftertaste until he's lost the subtleties to louder things. He puts the foot photograph on his refrigerator, and thinks that Alex would approve.

*

The weather stays beautiful and semi-cloudy, which is exactly what Viggo has hoped for. It promises to be a lazily productive Sunday and his good mood stays with him as they drive, Christine behind the wheel with one arm out the window and her sandal-clad feet working the pedals. The crinkled laugh lines at the corners of her eyes deepen as they talk. He tries to count the lines but each time her expression changes. The last hour of the drive he closes his eyes and focuses, trying to match their even breathing for the sake of nothing in particular.

*

Sitting on a patch of sand close enough to the water to be damp but far away enough to avoid being wet, Christine's feet are brushed with sand. Her knees are drawn up, arms around her legs, hands dangle near her ankles, fingernails full of sand. Viggo shifts forward on his belly, his lens stealing her ankles. The camera clicks its way up to her bare, pink knees and, at the hem of her shorts, is momentarily tilted away. She smiles nervously, cheeks darkening, and he quickly leans between her knees and presses the shutter up at her glowy face.

*

The four photographs that survive Viggo's scrutiny are shared straight away. She's more curious this time around, and comes seeking him. He sets aside this handful--one of her fingers curled over sandy feet, one of her knees digging into wet sand, one of half her face backlit gorgeously by a ray of sunlight that catches the lines of her face and the shape of her teeth, and one almost entirely blurry and taken from a distance that renders her form barely recognizable. "These are wonderful," she says. He shrugs and replies cordially, "That's you. The photos themselves are decent."

*

She gradually stops wandering his head. Now he has a shoebox with her name on it; and inside that box are over a hundred pictures of her, and from the pictures is spawned recollection of lovely hours of fixation twisted completely around her. He finds that he has not one picture of her entire body, and those that come close are either so blurry that he feels they don't count, or missing at least a limb or a shock of hair so as to remain incomplete. And the picture--the overall one, that is--couldn't come together any other way. 


End file.
